Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.